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Valve's Source Engine Coming To Linux

Phoronix: Valve's Source Engine Coming To Linux

There have been rumors since last year that Valve may be serious about porting Source games to Linux after Valve Software began seeking a senior software engineer with the responsibility of porting Windows-based games to the Linux platform. Valve Software has yet to officially announce Linux clients for any of its software, but at Phoronix we have received information confirming that Valve is indeed porting its very popular Source engine to the Linux platform.

Still way too speculative. Valve already releases their dedicated servers for linux. They might just be looking for someone else to help with this. It seems you have another source for the client being ported than just the job posting, but until I hear more about who or what this source is, I'm go to remain skeptical. Even if they are working on a linux port, there's no guarantee it will be finished. It's not like their business depends on porting the game to linux, so if the project runs into any bumps it'll be the first to be dumped.

Still, it would be nice if steam and the source engine was fully ported to linux. I'm just really skeptical that it'll happen.

Still, it would be nice if steam and the source engine was fully ported to linux. I'm just really skeptical that it'll happen.

Uh, considering that Michael here just said he got a bit of insider information that leads him to believe that they're actually DOING it.

While I'm not holding my breath, how the AMD stuff has gone down (Much as he basically described it- at least on the documentation and FOSS driver front...) that I'm willing to consider the possibility that he's telling it as it is.

If this is what caused the delay on UT3, someone over at EPIC needs to re-evaluate how they handle PR- if this has been the holdup, the way they did this is NOT how you handle things.

b ) Khronos has to get off their *ss and give us an openGL API that can exploit the modern hardware.

What's wrong with OpenGL 2?

Originally Posted by deanjo

e ) Game developers have to stop using closed source non-free media formats in their games (ie mp3, bink)

As long as they ship the decoding libraries with the game, I don't see how this is a practical problem. It shouldn't really be any different from the formats used by the game for anything else (models, textures, level data, etc.)

openGL 2 does not support many features that are found in DX 10. openGL 3 will support instance rendering, streaming vertex data to a buffer, texture buffer objects, new texture formats and more. To become the ultimate gaming OS you have to not only meet your competitors but exceed their offerings. Also openGL 3 is supposed to get down more to the "bare metal" then the current offerings.

openGL 2 does not support many features that are found in DX 10. openGL 3 will support instance rendering, streaming vertex data to a buffer, texture buffer objects, new texture formats and more. To become the ultimate gaming OS you have to not only meet your competitors but exceed their offerings. Also openGL 3 is supposed to get down more to the "bare metal" then the current offerings.

Heh... They had ARB extensions pretty much ratified for all of the DX10 capabilities out the door about at the same time Vista shipped. I know, my former client's OpenGL group management were commenting on the "thickness" of the spec docs as a whole (Bloody REAMS of paper...)...

Whether or not the ARB_foo items are implemented yet or not remains to be seen, but it was my understanding that the vendors were working on making them happen when I left my former client's employ.

I do hope they'll get about the problem of the multitude of distributions

Heh... THAT is easy, believe it or not. LGP's done it all the time. The only gotcha would be a major ABI change that breaks the linkage rules for binaries. Loki Games stuff got busted on that- the devs didn't care because they're presuming that you'll have the vendor or distribution fix it for you.

Right now, as long as you're not trying to install for system-wide use, there's several differing ways to produce runtimes and install that just simply work for all distributions.

a) Well, they were talking about Steam so I imagine installation will just be as easy as in Windows. Once you've installed Steam you shouldn't have any problems.

b + c) Although you are right about this, for the moment I would be deleriously happy to have native ports of the Valve games even without all the latest Shader N effects and 33.5 channel surround sound.

d) Mostly agreed. I bought Unreal Tournament 3 because I was convinced Epic would pring out the Linux client soon enough. Wish I could give it back telling them that I don't want it until they bring out their damn Linux client.

e) I'm not sure about that. Why? Some will oblige you, but I think most won't even think about making it easy for you to get at their "source material", why should they? Although it's not the FLOSS way if people are willing to pay for closed-source games, let them. Demanding free media will only make it difficult for Linux to become a popular gaming platform. (Hey, would be great if I was proven wrong though)

f) Well some Windows upgrades break games as well, I imagine you can never guarantee this. But again, if Valve would be serious about supporting Linux any updates to the game code would automatically be distributed to all their customers.